A companion blog for TeacherLINK - http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu - provided by the Adele & Dale Young Educational Technology Center (the YETC), College of Education & Human Services, Utah State University (Nathan Smith, Director). This blog focuses on resources related to the College's departments/units, on educational technologies and resources, NASA & STEM resources/opportunities for educators, and more! Blog submissions can be emailed to usu.yetc@gmail.com

Friday, March 16, 2012

TechRepublic: 15 Android widgets that will make iPhone users jealous

One of the biggest advantages of Android over iPhone is widgets. Android has them, iPhone does not.
Widgets are valuable because they give you an at-a-glance look at
lots of different kinds of information and quick access to valuable apps
and configuration settings.

I carry both an Android phone (for work) and an iPhone (my private
phone), but there are some things where I always reach to whip out the
Android phone because I can access the information more quickly via a
widget. If I was a normal person that only used one phone and I was
limited to an iPhone, widgets are the biggest thing I’d miss about
Android.

To help you find some of the most useful widgets, I’ve put together
my list of the top 15. I first published this list of my favorite
widgets in August 2010. In this latest update, I’ve replaced 12 out of
the 15 widgets on the list and I’ve updated the screenshots for Android
4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich.”
The best way to view this list is in the screenshot gallery
so that you can see each of the widgets. But, you can also view it in
list form below, with links to the Android Market for each of the
widgets. I’ve tried to find widgets that will generally work on almost
all versions of Android and aren’t limited to specific flavors, but
obviously that’s a tall order.

A couple things to keep in mind with widgets:

They can hog resources, bandwidth, and battery life so you should
make sure you’re using a task monitor to keep an eye on them; I wouldn’t
necessarily recommend running all 15 at once, just pick the ones that
are most important and that you’ll use the most often

Widgets can take up a lot of screen real estate and so you may need to use an alternate home screen launcher, such as Launcher Pro, to give yourself some extra space